The politics of Weiguan in China’s internet events

This article examines the historical evolution of weiguan politics in China with a particular focus on the characteristics and political impacts of weiguan in the Internet era. It proposes a ‘mediation’ approach to study political communication in China’s digital age. It argues that the Internet has become a public interventional tool in China, through which, different social actors compete, negotiate, interact and mutually constitute each other. Online weiguan and the Internet events provide concrete, vivid and contextualized cases to analyze the interplays between multiple stakeholders and the political impacts of such interplays.